I’ve recently grabbed a couple of these new sensors from Switchbot and they come complete with two AAA batteries pre-fitted. The back comes off easily for replacement, no tools required. Model is W3400010. Don’t ask why the box is so dirty – no idea. Once set up in the Switchbot APP (in my case on Android), the new sensor by default is called “Outdoor Meter 7A) with a claimed battery life of 1 year. Not a lot to say about these outdoor units – they come with a lanyard so you can hang them up — and they work as you’ll see in the photos. I’ve also added them to Google Home so they appear in my ..read more

This morning, a package arrived for me from Amazon.es containing a pair of decent-looking garden solar lights from Linkind (I’m a bit surprised their website prefix as detailed in their manual is http, not https). Straight up I should say I’d never heard of Linkind until recently – but these (StarRay G2 Series 2-pack) look a little better than the average Chinese solar light. I say the above with a caviat: my biggest problem with solar lights is the weather. I’ve no real idea what the weather is like in China but here in Southern Spain we get HOT summers (by which I mean 40c or higher at peak ..read more

The full title of this 4G router is “AC1200 Dual Band Gigabit LTE WiFi Router – Archer MR600” with the symbol 4G+ on the latest box. I just bought my second unit… There’s a long backstory to this so I’ve split my blog about 4G broadband into the original and this one. For some time now I’ve been using the TP-Link MR600 router, not realising there are three versions of it – not firmware but three actual hardware variations. I knowingly bought version 2, specifically because of improved 4G sensitivity over version 1 – that much is well documented on the web. I recently convinced a friend here i ..read more

Mo puns please – and if you know all about MATTER this is not for you. With that said, until this week, I had no idea what MATTER was – but now I do, I can’t learn fast enough. If you are into IOT home control, perhaps it has occurred to you that every supplier has their own, usually mutually incompatible APP for cameras, lights, power control – you name it. And they all want you to use THEIR cloud to log in. I HATE all of that as do many others. That’s one reason I’ve been sticking with the likes of Tasmota for all these years – local control, no need for an APP (I use NODE-RED Dashboard runn ..read more

Over the years I’ve seen IOT-related projects come and go – the latest, greatest home control APP at one time was going to be Imperihome (swiftly followed by Blynk). As far as I can see, the website no longer exists – I wrote about it back in early 2016 – about the same time I was starting to develop my BIGTIMER for Node-Red. Of course, 2016-2023 – that’s a long time in tech. Yet here I am, still making minor improvements to BigTimer – and Node-Red is regularly updated by the node-red team along with Node-Red Dashboard. That brings me to the point of this short article. We have a pump in our ..read more

Som time ago I had several 3D resin printers – today I have but one. Due to shortage of space I passed on all but my AnyCubic Photon Mono printer. And there it was sitting in a corner as I have WAY too much to do and far too little time so I’ve not done any kind of printing for the past year or so, when, out of the blue, the Zhuhai Sunlu Industrial company contacted me to ask me if I’d like to check out their “High Toughness Resin”. As you do, I said “yes, sure” and before long, a 1000g container of their solid grey resin was on it’s way, along with a similar size container of “Sunlu Resin Det ..read more

Something new! Well, not new to me, but they MAY be new to you? Plant Gel (water crystals) are a (supposedly) 100% non-toxic, biodegradable, and odourless super- absorbent Polyacrylamide crystal, that absorb up to 400 times their weight in water. In English, these are tiny capsules, available DIRT cheap from both real and online stores, which can be used to retain moisture, for example in the top layer of soil for your plants – and I’m sure there are many other uses for them. I discovered these years ago on AliExpress then forgot all about them until I spotted them in our local Chinese store h ..read more

A while back I wrote about a really cheap AliExpress Smartlamp – which had to work with the Smartlife App as it was (is) WiFi based. The lamp in question was the AUBESS lamp and I wrote about it here. All very nice – my comments were that this (fairly normal sized) E27 lamp claimed to be 15w and was indeed as bright in WHITE as my normal, somewhat larger (but out of stock at the time) Athom Tasmota pre-programmed lights but dimmer in RGB. I like to control my lights with Node-Red and hence my all-singing Node-Red-Dashboard page-set on my phone which incorporates Zigbee 3.0-compatible devices i ..read more

I have in front of me the new TX Ultimate Smart Touch Wall Switch from Sonoff as well as the equally impressive dark replacement cover. This recent trend worries me a little, the packaging on this wallswitch is just stunning – but are we paying for the aesthetics – Sonoff started off poducing an incredibly cheap and reliable mains controller, then better versions, then dual and quad controllers and then added cloud control and – well, you just need to search through my blog or the Sonoff site to see what they’ve done – LOTS. They even had a go at smart lamps at one time – that failed miserably ..read more

The plan was to simply to produce a really tiny video to show you the new remote control (for the M6 gimbal) which arrived in the post yesterday from Hohem. That expanded out to this explanation, photos and a link back to my Hohem M6 entry as well as a short video at the end. Hope you like it. The package arrived yesterday in a large box, I’d have no idea what it was were it not for the blantant Hohem branding. To call this well-packed would be an understatement. You can see that inside the box was a tiny plastic enclosure with an even tinier remote control. Note that there are two remote con ..read more